]]>Further growth of online sales is inevitable. This continued shift from brick-and-mortar retail shops to the online world affects everyone from the manufacturer to the distributor. Those looking to stay competitive must understand a new set of consumer wants and needs, new business models emerging, and those technologies that hold the most promise for the future.

]]>The Department of Energy is putting a collective $9 million into 7 projects being developed at universities and government labs that will us big data to lower the cost of solar in various ways. The projects, at places like Yale, and the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, will be focused on using analytics to lower the cost of solar installations and making solar cells more efficient.

Apple’s massive solar farm in North Carolina, photo by WCNC-TV

Here’s the 7 projects:

A solar financing model: NREL and solar financing startup Clean Power Finance will use $2.26 million to analyze data from 1,300 solar installation companies to try to create new types of community and regional financing methods.

A publication and patent reader: SRI International, the University of Toledo and GE will use $600K to create software that can read and analyze science publications and patents to unearth innovations that can lower the cost of solar.

Articulate a solar theory: Gordan Moore had his own law for chips, and some in the solar sector talk about a Swanson’s Law for the dropping cost of solar, but folks at MIT will use close to $500K to study the tech evolution process of solar and to create an overarching theory.

Better forecasting of production costs: Researchers at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, Arizona State University and the University of Oxford will use almost $950K to analyze data about patents, prices and production to create better forecasts of solar cell, wafer and panel prices.

A model for solar markets: Sandia National Labs, the University of Pennsylvania and the California Center for Sustainable Energy will use $2.3 million to process data about solar markets and to create a model looking at how economic and social issues impact solar installations.

Better strategies for community-led solar purchasing: Yale and SmartPower’s New England Solar Challenge will use $1.9 million to develop new strategies to that can make community solar buying programs work better.

More effective solar installation in Texas: The University of Austin will use close to $500K to collaborate with six Texas utilities to create more strategic ways to install and interconnect solar in the state.

]]>Apple’s Siri works pretty well as a personal assistant but it’s not equipped to be your virtual travel guide. But Desti which, like Siri, is a spin out from SRI International, is launching today in public beta and is looking to take on that job for consumers.

Desti, which is debuting as an iPad app, offers users the ability to pose travel questions and get back specific recommendations on hotels, restaurants and events. The service, which is limited to Northern California for now, was built using SRI’s artificial intelligence technology, combined with natural language processing, semantic search and a travel-specific knowledge base. The system uses contextual clues and what it knows about a user to return relevant results, which are displayed on a very visual results page.

So for instance, I can type in “Hotels near Moscone Center with a gym for under $200,” into the Desti’s instant messenger interface. Desti responds with a batch of results it thinks best match my request. It might just be a handful of places but Desti can show the results it’s confident about.

The results appear like cards with pictures, listing off Desti’s own rating, what amenities the hotel has and what good and important things to keep in mind. It also features additional resources and tips. If it needs more information to help it narrow its search, Desti will ask for it. Users can save a destination in their collection and they can share that with other users.

Desti is able to understand context when a user interacts with it. If I’m looking at a destination and ask what else is around, it pulls up results related to my last search. And if the weather is cold, it can change its results to find you something to do indoors. The service is designed for text input but you could easily do voice dictation with the latest versions of the iPad.

Like many new travel services, Desti also taps your social graph. So it can learn your tastes from Facebook likes and you can share your collections with others. And when you visit a place where another user has been, Desti will let you know and see what comments they’ve left.

Desti co-founder and CEO Nadav Gur said what users really need is more than just suggestions from friends or a basic search engine. Users need a travel-oriented search engine that uses artificial intelligence to understand their intent, so they’re not just getting back links, but actual answers.

Desti’s knowledge relies on about a numbers services like Factual, Wikipedia and Foursquare for data. It gets its hotel information from Hotels Combined, which gives a referral fee to Desti. Desti, however, doesn’t try to guide people to hotels where it can make money. The service also doesn’t cover flights at the moment though that will likely come at a later date.

Desti spun out of SRI a year ago and has raised $1.5 million from Carmel Ventures and Horizon Ventures, which also invested in Siri.

I wish Desti worked with an iPhone or smartphone. Right now, you have to email yourself to sync your research and saved collections to a smartphone, which is the device that’s more likely to be carried around on trips. Desti also faces a lot of competition from a host of social travel apps, services like TripAdvisor and of course, Google, which is loading up on travel services and is working on its own semantic search efforts. But I’d like to give Desti a try when it opens up to more locations. Travel planning is still not as enjoyable or easy as it ought to be.

]]>Google Talk video chat users with Honeycomb tablets can soon start walking and talking, thanks to SRI International, a nonprofit research institute. On Thursday the Menlo Park, Calif., organization announced availability of its 2D video stabilization software for Google Talk video. The software not only minimizes any shaking on the incoming video but could also reduce the amount of effort needed from a device to encode the video, which can help battery life.

Here’s how SRI explains the stabilization solution that was chosen by Google for use in Google Talk on tablets:

Video chat applications capture video from the front-facing camera on smartphones and tablets. Once an image is acquired by a camera, it is compressed before it can be transmitted. In video compression algorithms, the bandwidth used to encode the video increases with the amount of motion in the scene.

By stabilizing the video, SRI’s software compensates for scene motion and allows the video compression algorithm to improve image quality by using fewer bits to encode the video. There is increased mobile device efficiency when an image is stabilized before compression, and there is less work for a device’s video compression engine to perform.

One one hand, I don’t believe that most people are walking and video chatting at the same time. And I’m not sure I even want to see people doing so; they’re likely to hurt themselves or someone else. But I’ve personally seen a need for image stabilization when video chatting with my son. He’s often on a mobile device and walking around the house when chatting with me from his mom’s home. It drives me crazy, to be honest, so if SRI is looking for beta testers in the future, I have a prime, youthful candidate.

On the other hand, there’s little doubt that stationary computing is becoming a legacy activity for some. Consumers and enterprises alike are doing more while away from a desk, kitchen table or other “traditional” computing area. Tablets and smartphones are gaining or already have front-facing video cameras for chatting, while new software applications are popping up or adding video calls. So while the masses may not yet be walking and video talking, it looks like this communication will be used on the go more often. Gaining image stability for moving video chats won’t make it a safer activity, but it will make it more enjoyable.

The side benefits from SRI’s solution are nice for mobile devices, too. If a device doesn’t have to work as hard to compress a video due to image stabilization before compression, that can marginally reduce the power load and bring some battery efficiency. Only heavy video chatters are likely to see any improved battery life as compared to non-optimized video chatting, but every little bit of juice is precious when it comes to mobile devices. Even the most portable device is rendered useless with a dead battery.

]]>These days, it seems like there’s a new incubator for just about every pair of 19-year-olds working on a mobile-payment startup.

But long before there was a Y Combinator or a 500 Startups, there was SRI International: the old school, non-profit research and development organization that’s had a hand in the creation of everything from Disneyland to the Internet. Started by Stanford University in 1946 as a way to drum up enterprise in the sleepy Bay Area, SRI is best known for churning out a smorgasbord of inventions like Technicolor (for which it won an Academy Award in 1959), to the first computer mouse, created there in 1968.

The 2,400-employee organization celebrates its 65th birthday this year. Today, the federal government is the organization’s bread and butter, accounting for 70 percent of the $500 million in revenue from sponsored research SRI brings in annually. The Department of Defense is the company’s biggest client by far.

But while research contracts keep the electricity turned on and the robots powered up, the revenue doesn’t provide for extras like an endowment fund. Nor does it allow for the type of financial compensation a team of top-shelf scientists, business development specialists and executives could make in private industry.

Over the last 20 years, SRI has been spinning off major bio-tech, Internet technology and advanced material companies created by its own researchers, who then must decide if they will stay at SRI and keep creating or head for the new venture and an opportunity for riches.

The Menlo Park, Calif.-headquartered company has created more than 50 spin-off ventures based on breakthrough technologies developed within its laboratories. Three of the ventures — Intuitive Surgical, Nuance Communications and Orchid Cellmark — are now public companies with a total market-cap value of more than $20 billion.

More recently, a government contract to develop an intuitive, automated personal assistant program for military personnel resulted in a huge deal with Apple: Last April, SRI sold online personal assistant app Suri to Apple for an undisclosed sum that “made us very happy, very very happy,” said Norman Winarsky, VP at SRI Ventures.

This monetization model was a result of the 1980 Patent and Trademark Law Amendments Act (otherwise known as the Bayh–Dole Act), which gave universities and non-profits intellectual property rights for commercial applications resulted from government grants.

In 1993, the Sarnoff Corporation, (previously an SRI subsidiary and now fully part of SRI) began a ventures strategy. An iris recognition company called Sensar was the first official spin off company. Within two years, all of SRI had adopted the venture strategy.

Researchers who work on projects are encouraged to think about the commercial applications of their projects and to approach the SRI Ventures board with their ideas. The company incubates its spin-off ventures within its own facilities to provide seed money, work space, infrastructure support and business-development resources that include early access to white-shoe VC firms that have invested in multiple SRI enterprises and will weigh in early on the commercialization potential.

“We want to distinguish ourselves from academic institutions. We are not here to educate people,” said Winarsky. “It’s an unnatural act for an academic institution to bring together diverse solutions to market opportunities and integrate them into something that can be delivered into the marketplace, and for us its a natural act.”

When a venture spins off or a product is licensed, 66 percent of the funds go to an SRI endowment fund, which was an empty bank account 15 years ago. The remaining 34 percent goes to SRI staff. The biggest chunk goes to the team that worked on it, while 7 to 8 percent goes to senior staff “that suffered the five years of effort they had to put in” and 4 percent goes to all employees in a profit-sharing deal, Winarsky said. He credits this model with preserving SRI:

I personally believe SRI would have been hollowed by by Google, Apple and everybody else you can image for its great researchers. But as a result of having spinoff strategy for royalty and equity — by the way that’s vested so we keep the golden handcuffs on them for three to four years — by having spinoff strategy we can offer stock even though we are a company that’s non-profit and has no stock. An employee has to decide: Do you want to stay here and do great research and keep your equity and royalty or do you want to leave and keep all your eggs in that basket?”

Materials research laboratory director Angel Sanjurji has been faced with that choice more times than most. A 30-year veteran at SRI, he’s been involved in at least five spinoff ventures to date. And while some of his co-workers have chosen to go the entrepreneurial route, Sanjurji says he will be staying put.

“Here you really have the freedom to do research and implement your own ideas. Basically, you’re only budgeted by your imagination,” he said. “I think at SRI, we have the best of the both worlds. You may not make as much money as you could on the outside, but at the same time, you are not taking that risk. And for me, at the end of the day, everyone that stays has the same driving force. They want to develop new things.”